


In Which Hohenheim Joins the Party, Edward Hates That, and Alphonse Would Like Everyone to Stop Yelling Now Please

by LaurenKing



Series: In Which Souls are Swapped, People are Traumatized, and Everyone Has To Deal With That [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 15:46:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21077399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaurenKing/pseuds/LaurenKing
Summary: Otherwise known as 'Stop Yelling Now Please' for brevity's sake. Sequel to 'What the Hell is a Host Club', runs parallel to the other fic in this series that will deal with the aftermath on the Host Club side. The parallel fics will be mostly separate, but neither will make sense without reading 'What the Hell is a Host Club' first (beware spoilers for that in this summary).---After failing to execute the Promised Day, Father flees Amestris in order to regroup and begin plotting again. Knowing that, Hohenheim decides to set off to track him down and end him once and for all. Of course, Edward and Alphonse aren't going to let Father run free, either, and (reluctantly, in Edward's case) team up with their dad to track him down. Winry, hearing that Ed and Al are traveling cross-country, decides to go with them as their mechanic.Meanwhile, Mustang and Hawkeye, along with a questionably-reformed Pride, are left to begin rebuilding Amestris after the damage done to it by the botched Promised Day. That task, and the relationship between Hawkeye and Mustang, is complicated somewhat by the aftermath of a body-swap that left Mustang's original form dead, giving him no way to swap back to himself.





	In Which Hohenheim Joins the Party, Edward Hates That, and Alphonse Would Like Everyone to Stop Yelling Now Please

It was too damn stuffy in Mustang’s ‘apartment’. The heavy curtains blocked any breeze that might have drifted in through the open window. Eventually the noise of reconstruction outside made him close the window itself as well. Besides, he was about to go through a new stack of reports, and didn’t want anyone overhearing the conversation. The report itself would be mostly open knowledge: the position of other survivors, their relative safety, whether they needed reinforcements or supplies, progress on rebuilding nearby cities and towns, all the general knowledge needed to facilitate the rebuilding of a country. He wasn’t worried about anyone overhearing that. However, he wasn’t keen on the idea of anyone hearing the inevitable remarks from his new paperweight.

Pride, trapped in a glass flask that had been supplied by the Elric boys’ father, sat on top of a stack of progress reports. He was quiet for once, actually reading the letter that Mustang had placed him on top of. That at least gave Mustang time to make himself a sandwich before he sat down to work. The kitchen was kind of a mess, but the brief idea of cleaning it was clearly just a way for him to procrastinate his actual work. Mustang dismissed it and went back to his desk, sinking into his chair with a long-suffering sigh.

“Well?” he asked.

Pride looked up at him, though kept one eye on the letter. “Well  _ what _ ?”

Mustang rolled his eyes, retrieving the letter and holding it up. “Well, what are you going to do about this?” Written on fine paper in a looping, elegant script, it stood out among the various reports littered around the room even when it wasn’t the topic of conversation. Mustang had never gotten any personal correspondence from the First Lady of Amestris before. Well, honestly, he still hadn’t. The letter was for ‘Selim’. From the quick glance that Mustang had taken before giving it to Pride, it was mostly what he expected: a worried mother’s plea for her son to join her in the safe area they had carved out in Central, rather than stay in East City any longer. “We went to all the effort of finding her for you, and now you’re ignoring her?”

Pride huffed, glaring. “You had your own reasons for finding her, too.”

“Maybe. But we could have done without her,” Mustang said with a shrug, putting the letter back beside Pride.

One of Pride’s eyes followed the letter, another stayed trained on Mustang. “You wouldn’t have, though.”

“We do need someone for people to rally around,” Mustang said. Besides, they were rescuing civilians anyway. Having people keep an eye out for Mrs Bradley wasn’t too difficult. “But you’re avoiding the question.”

The dark mass inside the flask twisted slightly. It looked uncomfortable. “Are you going to send me to Central, then?”

Mustang considered it. He really would like to be rid of Pride. Being stuck inside because of that body-swapping nonsense wasn’t made any more pleasant by keeping Pride around. Unfortunately, Mustang was pretty sure that he owed Pride his life. “... No. Net yet.”

Pride looked away from Mustang and focused back on the letter. “Is she aware of what the Fuhrer and I are?”

“We  _ did _ have to explain some of what happened with Bradley, but we didn’t tell anyone about that mess with you homunculi,” Mustang said. The official story was that Bradley was part of the conspiracy in the upper levels of the government that had unleashed the Immortal Soldiers on Amestris, and had been killing civilians in an effort to clean up the mess the others had made of the situation.

At least, that’s what Hawkeye had said they told everyone in her report. Mustang himself wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone who wasn’t already aware of the body-swapping. After all, news of his ‘death’ in the fight with Bradley had spread like wildfire, and Hawkeye didn’t trust him not to give himself away. In the end, he had agreed to stay in East City and oversee things from there. Pride had, for some reason, wanted to stay in East City as well, and no-one wanted to leave him on his own. Hence how Mustang ended up locked in his apartment surrounded by reports and babysitting a homunculus.

“Well, you have fun figuring out how to deal with that. I’ve got a country to rebuild,” Mustang said, setting Pride and the letter aside and shuffling his most recent pile of reports closer to him. Apparently, according to a network of civilian informants that had been hastily set up to keep a general eye on things, Fullmetal’s group had finally made it to the Aerugonian border. Hopefully they wouldn’t have too much trouble getting across.

The border between Amestris and Aerugo wasn’t all that crowded, but it was (like most borders of Amestris) well-guarded. A small outfit of Aerugonian soldiers sat at their posts, chatting quietly with each other. It would have been a fairly normal scene, were it not for the bodies. Thankfully, none of the various bodies were human ones. They were all Immortal Legion soldiers, still struggling despite being skewered, crushed, or otherwise immobilized.

“That’s just… gruesome,” Winry said. She, Alphonse, Edward, and Hoenhiem had decided to take a look at the border before trying to cross, and were sitting behind a rocky outcropping.

“What else can they do? Those things aren’t going to stop, and they’re too hard for most people to kill,” Edward said. Despite his callous words, he kept his eyes off the struggling legion soldiers. “Stay here. Al and I will take care of them.”

Winry sighed, settling in where she was sitting. Edward had been running ahead to ‘take care of things’ over and over since they had set off for Aerugo. Not that Winry was really complaining, honestly. She had done enough running around since the Promised Day. Still…

“I feel a little useless just sitting here.” Hoenheim suddenly voiced Winry’s thoughts out loud, making her sit up with a start.

“Ah… Yeah,” she said, glancing away. She didn’t really know how to feel about Hohenheim. On the one hand, he was the man who had abandoned his sons for years, hurting Edward and Alphonse so badly. But on the other, he just felt strangely comforting to be around. The silence between them wasn’t as awkward as it could have been.

Despite that, Hohenheim usually filled the silence whenever Edward wasn’t there. Maybe he just felt the need to talk to  _ someone _ , especially when the animosity radiating off of Edward wasn’t right there. “He’s really grown, hasn’t he? You all have.”

“Yeah.” Despite agreeing, Winry didn’t feel that sense of pride that was evident in Hohenheim’s tone. Instead, she felt a little bitter. “Maybe they grew up too fast, though. Those two… never let me help them as much as I could. They never let  _ anyone _ .”

Hohenheim sighed, staring at the ground. Part of Winry wanted to find a way to comfort him, but… well, he wasn’t exactly innocent. She didn’t want to punish him, but anything she said to alleviate that guilt wouldn’t really ring true.

Before either of them could break the tension, Edward and Alphonse returned. “We dealt with the legion, but the guards say we gotta wait with the other refugees to be ‘processed’,” Edward said, speaking entirely to Winry. He didn’t give his dad so much as a glance.

“They did say they would give us priority while they were processing people, though,” Alphonse added. At least he looked at Hohenheim, though he had clearly picked up on the tension between his brother and dad.

Winry ignored the uncomfortable group dynamic and instead focused on the good news. “That means we won’t have to wait long, right? That’s great!”

“I still feel bad, though,” Alphonse said, glancing back at the border. “Some of those people have been waiting a long time to get somewhere safe. Cutting ahead of them feels… wrong.”

“Oh. You’re right…”

“Wrong or not, we gotta hurry. It’s not like we’re going on holiday, we’ve got something important to do,” Edward said, crossing his arms.

Hohenheim nodded in agreement. “Father is dangerous. The sooner we find and destroy him, the better. Though, I hope you didn’t tell those guards about our mission, Edward.”

Edward scoffed, clearly annoyed that he was being forced out of the silent treatment he had committed to, as well as offended at the assumption Hohenheim had made. “I didn’t even tell them I was a State Alchemist. You think Aerugonian soldiers are going to let anyone on military business into their country?”

“I don’t like it any more than you do, Al, but this seems to be the best way,” Winry said.

Alphonse nodded, though still clearly wasn’t happy about it. “It’s not how I wanted to get in, but we need to focus on stopping Father from hurting more people.”

“Well, if that’s all settled,” Edward cut in, starting to walk back toward the border, “I’d like to put some of this gear down and have a warm meal for once. Let’s get going.”

**Author's Note:**

> Finally! Bet y'all thought I was dead, huh? Thank goodness I'm not, and now that I've sorted out some stuff irl I can get back to writing. Once again I can't promise regular updates, but I can promise that this will eventually be finished, as well as the other fic in this series.


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